TALES OF A MODERN SUFI.: The Invisible Fence of Reality and Other Stories

Rumi; Nevit O. Ergin; Will Johnson

ISBN 10: 1594772703 / ISBN 13: 9781594772702

Published by Inner Traditions, Rochester, 2009

About this Item

Foreword by Coleman Barks; 141 pages.

Seller Inventory # 13300

Bibliographic Details

• Title: TALES OF A MODERN SUFI.: The Invisible Fence of Reality and Other Stories
• Publisher: Inner Traditions, Rochester
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594772703
• ISBN 13: 9781594772702
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Paperback in new condition.
• Seller catalogs:
  • Sufism

About this title

Synopsis

A collection of modern Sufi tales by renowned Rumi translator and Sufi initiate Nevit Ergin

• Contains 24 deceptively simple stories that invoke questioning and awareness

• By the renowned English translator of Rumi’s complete Divan-i Kebir

Sufi stories have traditionally been a means of opening a portal that allows us to advance from our basic perceptions into states of extraordinary awareness. This collection of deceptively simple stories by renowned Rumi translator and Sufi Nevit Ergin has the ability to remove readers’ complacent sense of self and identity and to expand their ordinary awareness of reality from every possible direction. In his stories the primrose path we travel suddenly turns into a trickster’s hall of mirrors where we learn that we are not children of Adam and Eve so much as children of our perceptions.

The protagonists and antagonists of these stories are constantly morphing and exchanging places. They exist in a world where individuals are stalked by a cricket that is an “invisible monster with the face of a demon,” confront the ambiguous burden of ridding oneself of one’s own corpse, and discover the “invisible fence of reality” existing in the layers of a discarded piece of art. The symbols in these stories are booby traps designed to release the mind from the sense of its own importance and awaken the realization that “if you refuse to be born, you cannot die.” Blind faith, the author says, has proved itself incapable of producing wisdom, tolerance, or world peace. This is because the answers to humanity’s problems lie beyond our ordinary perception and require love and ecstasy to be made visible. Our thirst for wisdom and understanding must go to the fountain of universal truth. These stories provide water from that fountain.

About the Author

Nevit O. Ergin is the original English translator of the complete Divan-i Kebir and is the coauthor, with Will Johnson, of The Forbidden Rumi and The Rubais of Rumi. Since 1955, he has been an initiate in the Itlaq (“total liberation”) path of Sufism under the tutelage of Sufi master Hasan Lutfi Shushud. He lives in California.